In this PhD dissertation I present an account of a person-centred, feminist research project that explores the lived experience of women casual academics in Australia. Casual academics comprise more than 60% of academics employed in Australia, most of whom are women. Yet very little is known about the lived experience of these women. As I understand lived experience to be known and communicated through story and narrative, I employ a narrative epistemology as a foundation to this research project’s design and communication. In addition, I understand lived experience to be fully embodied, messy and contextually situated. I therefore employ a narrative inquiry to elicit the emotionally and cognitively lived experience of six women casual academics from three different universities in South East Queensland. I then re-present these stories in the form of proto-verbatim theatre. Proto-verbatim theatre is a contemporary form of performance which employs the words and stories of research participants within a highly theatricalised aesthetic. The form of the genre makes explicit the constructedness of the re-presentation and cognitively and emotionally engages an audience in the stories of Others. I employ this form as it is congruent with the fully embodied stories of the research participants and their doubly Othered status as women and casual academics.

Description

Submitted in the fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2015.